Mr Gumby
Thanks so much. You have given me enough here to keep me busy for weeks and I’m grateful for you for sharing your knowledge and enthusiasm for the music. I’ll post again after I’ve listened to some of your suggestions and watched the videos.
All the best
Russ
To clarify about Paddy Tunney; as a non-Irish speaker, I found his singing, in english, particularly useful in understanding some of the peculiarities of sean nos singing. How the melody and ornamentation could be stretched or fitted to the emotional weight of each line, and how that could change from verse to verse. So many singers in every genre seem to get away with ignoring the sense of what they’re singing, but a sean nos singer guilty of doing so would be howled down at the first hurdle.
If you listen closely to Tunney in English, particularly his recording of Sean O’Dwyer a Gleanna, one of the great irish slow airs/sean nos songs, it’s all there. Unless you’re a snob who declares that nothing in english can be sean nos, this is perfect, and for non-irish speakers, hugely informative. Yes, singing in english loses those great, singable, gaelic open vowels, but its got everything else.
I don’t really want an argument about it Simon, as I said my reaction was more one of gut feeling than anything else. I generally look at singers as one group: singers. And within that the sean nós enclosure is not very well defined in my mind with the Connemara crowd obviously and clearly in as well as singers from other Gealtacht areas but there’s a large fuzzy area around the edges, Language would be an issue to some but that crowd would have to evict Mick Flynn and his A stór mo chroí and that right there shows you just how untenable holding that position can be.
I must say that like instrumentalists (people here would say ‘musicians’. There are singers and there are musicians) modern sean nós singers can sound very conscious of what they are doing, like a craft that has been taught rather than something picked up, all the ornaments in their proper places and all that. I feel that’s a shame but what can you do? There’s a whole discussion to be had about that one, the effect of ‘passing on’ music in its natural environment and teaching music in formal settings (and the inevitable codification that comes with it).
Mick Flynn is probably on the Clare library site I linked to above. He had a few recordings of his own and he was also on the olf ‘Lambs on the Green Hills’ recording with other Clare singers. Look up Ollie Conway when searching that corner, he was a mighty singer too. His ‘Yellow Bittern’ was really something. And I love Vincie Boyle too, he can turn a crude Ritchie Kavanagh ditty like 'A little bit of ‘lastic’ into a fine piece of traditional singing.